Post-war prosperity seemed to anaesthetize Canadians from politics. Maurice Dup-lessis, restored to power in Quebec in 1944, and Ontario’s Tory premier, George Drew, led a ritual resistance to an aU-powerful central government, but their voters backed the
Liberals in federal elections. CCF supporters beat the Communists for control of the new industrial unions, but only in British Columbia, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba did the CCF collect many votes. OH wealth kept Alberta safe for Social Credit.
The wartime tax-rental agreements showed how Ottawa could fulfil the Rowell-Sirois Commission’s 1940 proposal to redistribute revenue from rich to poor provinces. Premiers from the wealthier provinces made sure that no such schemes survived the wartime emergency. In the end, only Quebec insisted on collecting a separate income tax, but all demanded a share of Canada’s richest revenue source. Provinces needed the money for the highways, hospitals, and schools their voters demanded. Rearmament, social programs, and some modest efforts at interprovincial equalization more than tripled Ottawa’s spending between 1946 and 1961. In the same period, municipal spending rose by 580 per cent, and provincial spending increased by 638 per cent. While federal finance ministers regularly boasted of surpluses half as large as the entire Quebec or Ontario budget, their provincial counterparts squirmed under voter hostility to new sales taxes. Ottawa disposed of its regular surpluses by announcing shared-cost programs for university expansion, completion of a Trans-Canada Highway, and new technical schools. Rich provinces could benefit; poor ones scrambled desperately to find their share. Paying only 25 cents to Ottawa’s 75 cents, Ontario could build 196 vocational high schools in 1962; less favoured provinces could only look on. Quebec’s Maurice Duplessis demanded financial compensation for federal development schemes that he rejected as interference in Quebec’s responsibilities. Ottawa ignored him.
Provincial politicians also felt heat from the regions and from groups that postwar prosperity had bypassed. In an urbanizing Canada, legislatures were still dominated by rural and small-town folk who had gained least from a changing economy. Eastern agriculture felt the loss of markets for bacon, apples, and cheese. An epidemic of foot-and-mouth disease in 1952 devastated the prairie cattle industry. That year, western wheat farmers harvested a 700-million-bushel bumper crop, but European recovery and fierce competition from other grain suppliers made the harvest an economic disaster. Much of the world was hungry, but prairie wheat was piled into community halls and curling rinks to wait for buyers. Farmers demanded cash for their carry-over; Ottawa refused. Prices, artificially controlled during the war years, now sagged under market conditions.
By the 1950s, fiscal caution was back in fashion in Ottawa. The Korean War had sent inflation to 10 per cent a year. The ccF demanded price controls. James Coyne, the new
John Diefenbaker on a whistlestop campaign tour in Saskatchewan in 1965, among the people who knew and loved him. Prairie farmers gained solid benefits from Diefenbaker’s policies, and his image as outsider and underdog evoked instant recognition from western voters.
Governor of the Bank of Canada, lectured Canadians against living beyond their means and boosted interest rates. Official Ottawa had accepted the economic wisdom of John Maynard Keynes: spend in bad times, even if it meant borrowing, and save in good times to pay off the debts. Coyne’s “tight money” plus surpluses in the federal treasury fitted Keynes’s counter-cyclical recipe for good times, but the policy enraged farmers, merchants, and all who depended on cheap credit. The fatal flaw in the new economic wisdom was political: not all regions were prospering, but all regions had votes.
Provincial Liberals were the first to pay the price. In 1935, they had run all but two provinces. By 1956, only four Liberal regimes survived. That year, the Conservative Robert Stanfield destroyed the oldest of them, in Nova Scotia. In Ontario and Quebec, prosperity helped Tories and the right-wing Union Nationale hold power. On the prairies, an ailing Liberal party lost Manitoba in 1958. Depression memories and a grass roots reforming style kept Tommy Douglas’s ccf in power in Saskatchewan. In 1952, Conservatives and Liberals in British Columbia agreed to a tricky transferable vote to keep out the ccf. The surprise beneficiary turned out to be a Tory-turned-Social Creditor, W. A. C. Bennett. Only in Newfoundland was the Liberal party safe, under the increasingly illiberal one-man rule of Joey Smallwood.
Canada’s holiday from politics ended with the pipeline debate of 1956. A two-week debate should have sufficed for a project all parties and most Canadians wanted. By enforcing closure—cutting off debate—C. D. Howe looked like an arrogant old man in a hurry. St. Laurent, at seventy-four, simply looked too old. Had the Liberals held power too long? George Drew, Tory leader since 1948, might have crushed that questioning mood with his own starchy arrogance, but ill health had suddenly removed him. To the dismay of the Tory establishment, a leadership convention chose John Diefenbaker, the lone Saskatchewan Tory mp, known for his demagogic style and his record of backing underdog causes. Within months, election audiences were thrilled by an old-fashioned political passion they had not encountered for years. For the first time, many Canadians saw their would-be leaders in the flickering black and white of television. Diefenbaker looked dynamic; St. Laurent was plainly weary and dl at ease. The images made a difference. On June 10, many Canadians voted Conservative, suspecting that Diefenbaker could not win but hoping that he might. And he did.
In a Parliament of 112 Conservatives, 107 Liberals, 25 ccf, and 19 Social Credit, St. Laurent might have formed a coalition, but he was too depressed to try. He retired at once. Within weeks, a Diefenbaker government boosted old age pensions from $40 to $56 a month, paid farmers for their wheat, and showed the Commonwealth that a Tory Canada would support its first African member, Ghana, against white members of the club. The Liberals chose Lester Pearson, with his Nobel Peace Prize prestige, as their new leader. Warned by pollsters not to risk a dissolution, the novice leader instead used evidence of a worsening economy to invite the Tories to hand power back to their more experienced predecessors. It was all Diefenbaker needed. Armed with a secret cabinet paper that had warned the Liberals of bad times, the Prime Minister roasted his enemies in rhetoric. Then he dissolved Parliament and repeated his campaign speech to scores of rapturous audiences. On March 31, 1958, there was simply no contest. The smaller parties were destroyed. Only 49 Liberals and 8 ccFers survived to face a phalanx of 208 Gonservatives. Quebec, at Duplessis’s direction, gave 50 of its 75 seats to the unUingual Baptist lawyer from Saskatchewan.
The victory was too great. The enormous mandate became a prize Diefenbaker refused to damage by hard decisions. Instead, it dissolved in indecision. The tiny Opposition found itself free to use all the old Tory tactics of obstruction to thwart the government’s plans. Closure, made offensive by the Tories in opposition, seemed equally repugnant to Tories in power. Running a law office, and a generation in the Opposition, had not prepared Diefenbaker for power. Civil servants, eager to prove their professionalism by loyalty to the new government, were nonetheless treated as enemies. In a spur-of-the-moment policy, Diefenbaker announced that 15 per cent of Canada’s imports would be shifted from the United States to Britain. When Britain responded by offering free trade, Diefenbaker was nonplussed and silent. When the British next proposed to join the European Economic Community, Diefenbaker insisted that the Commonwealth oppose the British initiative. External Affairs veterans winced. Among officials and journalists, confidence in the Prime Minister’s consistency or competence crumbled.
In power, the Tories did much for the people who had elected them. New programs encouraged marginal farmers to leave the land and helped others to prosper. The new government ignored U. S. pressure and its own ideology by opening China as a huge new market for Canadian wheat. Royal commissions, headed by loyal Tories, began studies that would lead to tax reform. Medicare, and armed forces reorganization. The new National Energy Board made all of Canada west of the Ottawa River a safe market for Alberta oil. A new Board of Broadcast Governors replaced the cbc as broadcast regulator and granted prominent Tories a licence for the first commercial television network—the English-language Canadian Television Network. The cbc and CTV would now compete for advertising and U. S. network shows.
Diefenbaker and his ablest ministers gave western Canada a voice in Ottawa that it had never enjoyed before. Quebec, in contrast, seethed over its feeble representation in government. As the recession deepened across Canada in the late 1950s, each Quebec layoff was blamed on Ottawa. Business and finance were outraged as an ostensibly Conservative government outspent its predecessor. Donald Fleming, finance minister and Toronto’s voice in government, proved helpless to curb mounting deficits. James Coyne’s resolute insistence on tight money in the face of recession was an economic folly that earned him dismissal as governor of the Bank of Canada in 1961. But by attacking Coyne for his generous retirement pension, not his principles, Diefenbaker managed the near-impossible feat of making a banker into a popular martyr.
Even good decisions backfired. If re-elected, the Liberals would probably have cancelled the Avro Arrow, seeing it as hopelessly extravagant. Instead, Diefenbaker dithered for months. By the time the axe fell in February 1959, Avro had convinced most Canadians that the Arrow was a supersonic marvel; the company had also done nothing for the fourteen thousand men and women who were fired on “Black Friday.” In days, every Arrow had been hacked into scrap. Instead of telling the truth about an inadequate aircraft and inept managers, Diefenbaker proclaimed that rockets had made manned fighters and bombers obsolete. Within months, Canada was dickering for a U. S.-built fighter, the F-101 Voodoo, that met the specifications for the Arrow at a quarter of the price ($2 million, not $8 million). Sites were also being prepared for an antibomber missile, the Bomarc-B.
Diefenbaker had taken power in 1957 as a cold warrior, boasting to cheering audiences that he would roll back the Iron Curtain. Within weeks, he had signed the norad agreement, putting Canadian air defences under U. S. control. Close to a billion dollars were devoted to new weapons that depended on nuclear warheads. Millions were spent on civil defence—officially rechristened “National Survival.” As Canadians began to recoil at the prospect of thermonuclear immolation, Pearson’s Liberals pledged to make Canada non-nuclear. So did the New Democratic Party (ndp), created in 1961 out of the old CCF, with backing from the young Canadian Labour Congress, founded in 1956. Letters and petitions poured into Diefenbaker’s office from peace groups and individuals. FFoward Green, a Great War veteran and passionate anti-American, brought his own anti-union convictions to the Department of External Affairs in 1959. Diefenbaker read his mail, listened to Green, and felt his own resentment of the Americans
The Avro Arrow was already a dead duck when it rolled out to a welcoming crowd in 1958. A magnificent airplane, it was more expensive and problem-plagued than a government on the verge of recession could afford.
The Arrow measured the extent—and limits—of Canada’s bid to compete in high technology.
Fuelled by John F. Kennedy, the brash young Democrat in the White House. Canadians were now told that they had no nuclear commitment in NATO or norad, and that their country would continue to set an example of military self-denial to the world.
Threats of nuclear holocaust probably mattered less to most Canadians than Canada’s troubled economic performance. The warnings in the secret Liberal cabinet document had been well founded. The post-war era had ended. Europe had recovered. By 1957, West Germany surpassed Canada as the world’s third-largest trading nation. By 1959, unemployment had climbed to 11.2 per cent, reminiscent of the 1930s, especially for workers who had exhausted their unemployment insurance benefits. The government was not indifferent. Accidental or not, its budget deficits reflected the Keynesian economic wisdom. Winter works programs finally taught contractors that their industry did not have to be wholly seasonal. Big spending and large deficits horrified bankers and business executives, but they helped end five straight years of heavy trade deficits and paved the way for the prosperity of the mid-1960s.
That made little difference to voters, particularly in the cities and regions that had gained the most from post-war prosperity. Businessmen now yearned for the ordered management of a C. D. Howe. Workers blamed Diefenbaker for the first long layoffs since the war. A sophisticated middle class ridiculed “The Chief” as a rustic anachronism. New Canadians, who had
By 1963—after years of demonstrations by anti-nuclear groups and an extensive letter-writing campaign—the majority of Canadians were opposed to acquiring nuclear weapons. This proved acutely embarrassing to the Diefenbaker government, which had recently ordered the Bomarc and other nuclear weapons systems.
Initially identified with Diefenbaker as a fellow outsider, now associated his period in power with unemployment, reviving prejudices and restrictions on immigration. The creators of the ndp had hoped to build on disillusionment with both old parties, but they had to battle the slogan that “Liberal Times Are Good Times.” In opposition, the Liberals had rejuvenated their organization. By the 1960s, business had money for them again. Lester Pearson’s past prestige was compensation for his awkwardness on a platform. So was the galaxy of former deputy ministers among his Liberal candidates.
What the Liberals and most Canadians forgot was how regional Canada had become in the years of post-war affluence. On election day, June 18, 1962, the prairie West stayed almost solidly Conservative. So did half the Maritimes and much of rural small-town Ontario. In Quebec, utter disillusionment with the Conservatives in working-class and backwoods constituencies benefited not the Liberals but a passionate car dealer from Rouyn named Real Caouette. Of 30 Social Crediters, 26 Creditistes came, like Caouette, from Quebec. With their help, 116 Conservatives could keep Diefenbaker in power against 99 Liberals and 19 New Democrats.
An early election seemed inevitable. No one could have predicted the reason: Diefenbaker’s nuclear indecision. Late in October 1962, John Kennedy took the world to the brink of war to force Soviet missiles out of Cuba. Alone among Washington’s allies, Canada did not promptly co-operate. (Privately and probably unknown to the Prime Minister, the Department of National Defence did all that could be asked). Americans were angry. Canadians were dismayed, not so much at Kennedy as at their own government’s mid-crisis failure to answer “Ready, Aye Ready” to their new imperial power. Opinion polls showed Canadian opinion moving to support a full alliance role, nuclear warheads and all. On January 12,1963, Pearson switched sides: Liberals would accept nuclear weapons and then negotiate for other alliance roles. In Parliament, Diefenbaker insisted that Canada’s allies were entirely content with his performance. A blunt message from the U. S. State Department corrected the Prime Minister’s more explicit untruths and concluded, succinctly: “the Canadian government has not as yet proposed any arrangement sufficiently practical to contribute effectively to North American defense.”
The American statement cracked a log-jam. Diefenbaker’s defence minister resigned in disgust. For the first time since 1926, a government was defeated in the House of Commons. Across Canada, hardly a newspaper had a kind word to say about John Diefenbaker. Several Tory ministers fled politics before the certain debacle. Their leader
Set out across Canada in the role he adored, the lonely righteous prophet. The Liberals pursued him with a “truth squad,” issued colouring books, and performed other meretricious media tricks as their support slowly sagged. On April 8, Pearson scored his victory, but it was no triumph: 129 Liberals, 95 Conservatives, 24 Social Credit and Creditistes, and 17 New Democrats. Across the West, only 10 Liberals won in a region that had given Mackenzie King his majorities. In all of Quebec, only 8 Conservatives survived. Not only would Canada have a minority government, as in 1921, but key regions would be ranged against each other.
The regions were back in Canadian politics. They might well make Canada ungovernable.
World History
